[Tom Laughlin]

Craig,

Sorry to stir you up, it’s not my intention to upset anyone.

This is our workflow:

1. We shoot using the (2) Sony EX-3 using 32GB Transcend Class 6 Cards. (1080p/24fps SP-mode). We always stop and power off the cameras before we eject the cards. We never let the camera keep rolling and “roll into a new card”.
2. We transfer the cards BPAV Folders to 500GB Rugged Orange drives using Mac’s Finder.
3. We verify the transfer by opening the file’s info and seeing that the exact file size matches the original file on the card.
4. We play the original card and verify no video is corrupted.

Later on,
1. We try using Clip Browser to play the BPAV Folder from off the hard-drives, and also importing them using XD Log and Transfer.
2. The clips playback with several green artifacts that look like static pixel lines, or lines of video that are pixeled. Some lines are green and some are lines that are thicker than others. Some are smaller and longer, etc, etc. The audio is fine, just the video.
3. We have had some projects where there is no artifacts and we have not altered any part of our workflow. We shot on brand new cards, and off-load them once the files are transferred to a HDD.
4. We try using FCP for the conversion process, as well as the XDCAM Log & Transfer to edit the video. The artifacts are not seen in the playback on the camera. They show up after the transfer or the conversion to .mov.

In reference to our workflow, we haven’t changed one thing, as mentioned in your response, we are simply trying multiple ways of trouble-shooting this artifacts problem. Interesting that it is happening with two separate cameras both having the same issues.

Can cards go bad only after 2-3 re-uses? Can a Sony camera’s recording and internal recording mechanisms go bad? Could the hard-drives, as you mentioned, be corrupting the media? Would e-Sata be better than a Firewire 800 Transfer? Do you think that a card can be fixed using CRC checking even after the transfers? How did you learn about CRC checking and has this been something other people have experienced, in terms of artifacting? How can video not be corrupted on the cards, yet with using 3 different transfer test methods, the cards still getting artifacts? You don’t have to respond to this post, I know this is over-kill.

Thanks a ton,

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, UT
FCS3/Sony EX-3/Mac Intel

[Tom Laughlin]

It appears that out of about 300 BPAV folders or more, we have about 77 with corrupted video. We are using a few things that I’m not sure if they are the source of the problem or not. We are often hard-lined SDI into a switcher for events, so I’m not sure if it is a bad SDI-in port in the camera or not, so you have experience with this and if quality suffered?

In the field, we are shooting all over and often inside offices, and we use wireless video transmitters and the IDX battery mounts with IDX batteries powering the wireless system and the camera all at once. I’m not sure if airports and their security systems are ‘frying’ the cards and the footage on them, but many times, we play the video, about 95% of the video is playable with no artifacts, when played inside the camera. Maybe the artifacts are too small to see in the viewfinder window, but we don’t see them.

I don’t see them when the video is played and video is captured back to FCP. It is when the video card hits the computer. I know we had once, it happen where we converted from the card and the artifacts went away, but weren’t able to consistently replicate that fix, it fixed a few cards, but most of the artifacts went away, not all, on the cards where that fix worked.

How can a Sony XDcam record hours and all the video end up corrupted? Can Transcend cards corrupt the media recording capabilities of a XD camera? Again, this is a significant amount of cards that are or had recorded and corrupted. We have used the same cards and backed them up over and over, is it possible for cards to go bad after many uses?

Do you know of anyone that has had or is currently having this problem? We are also having some editors having to actually edit around these artifacts, in FCP, they are editing out frames, and some of the video is not as bad as others, but I’m in a real pickle about this, as we have hundreds of hours that are being logged and so far, into this particular project with over 1TB of video, about 70% is somewhat artifact”y”.

Maybe it is the camera, but we have A and B camera both having issues with this artifact problem. This one project was shot on and off over a period of three months, so, there’s no consistent way to know how the cameras were reacting in the field, when in playback, the video looked fine.

I read a forum about CRC, I think you posted it, in which you talked about not using Mac’s “Finder”, and I’m not sure if that is part of the problem, as most of our work with off-loading was drag and drop and verify files by exact size, we assumed it was a clean transfer and the rest was history. I’m thinking more and more that it is camera recording, because we have always had either clean video, and Finder transferring happened, in every way. I don’t think we’ve ever used Clip Browser, and the concept of CRC checking wasn’t emphasized with the guys we got the cameras from.

I know many others who have had no problems with drag and drop using Finder, and this CRC, how crucially important has it been for you, in terms of what is actually does? And would this cause or contribute to media corruption? Is there any suggestions you have and can I email you some screen-grabs on Monday?

– Tom

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, UT
FCS3/Sony EX-3/Mac Intel

[Tom Laughlin]

Ok, so Craig, questions, here’s my problem, for a while I have several BPAV folders either not import, or it takes multiple attempts to make sure they copy all the way. Ones that do import, I’ve got several that are not giving me clean video. I get all sorts of green pixel lines and artifacts in my video. What can I do to take these out? I’ve tried converting from the card, no luck. And, with other forum info I’ve tried, using Clip Browser, it shows up in Clip Browser playback. I’ve copied the original BPAV to a card, from the archived external hd, and using Clip Browser, made a copy of the BPAV to see if it fixes the CRC, but the copy is a copy of the corrupted BPAV, it doens’t affect the quality, or am I doing it wrong? I’m running the latest version of Clip Browser, XDCam Log & Transfer won’t work, and the video is not clean when testing it through a mac with just leopard, no snow leopard.? What do think I can do?

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, UT
FCS3/Sony EX-3/Mac Intel

[Tom Laughlin]

Have 4 of them, purchased last year, and after over 30 shoots, still work fine, both for storage and FCP editing.

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Video Editor
School Improvement Network
Salt Lake City, UT
FCP7/Sony EX-3/Mac Intel

[Tom Laughlin]

Over the last year and a half, I’ve bought about 30 of the 32GB Transcend cards and 3 Hoodman adaptors for my 2 EX-3 cameras and have shot over 3K hours of video with these cards adn adaptors. Several things to keep in mind, there seems to a problem these cards have when you run into “Restore Media” quite a bit.

I know several times e’ve had video corrupted, as these are not Sony cards. The adaptors and the cards mimic the Sony file cards perfectly, but there are always points within using the correct brand for the right reasons versus saving money and paying for it with hundreds of unrecoverable video clips or video with green line artifacts, and many other issues. I know LenseWorks in SLC have all done away with all their Transcend cards and adaptors after having to turn away work due to non-Sony card issues. Since this company has switched back to all Sony cards and import and copy workflow, they have had no problems.

The new macs do not come with the cards slots for Hoodman adaptors, which transfer speed is identical to that of transferring a Sony card, so you’ll need to use the USB adaptor that comes with the card. We are slowly finding out that a lot of our artifacts could be caused not by the card, but by the way “Finder” file-transfers. I was reading about CRC-checking and we’re actually going to be testing this soon, but essentially what I’m saying is, we’ve had tons of problems with these cards, loosing video, corrupted video, or the “Restore Media” errors. We have 2 of the Sony 16GB cards on our crews and have never had any issues with Sony cards, recording, playing back, or transferring.

I’d wait till cards get cheaper of be careful with using the cards as you never know when you’ve lost video till you get back to the editing bay, or you’re right in the middle of a shoot, and “Restore Media” error happens and you’re scratching your head. Always remove the card, after you power it down. Never remove the card while it is still writing, as well as while it is still “Restoring Media”, red light blinking.

We’re still in debate whether we’ll get rid of ours or not. If we find some work-arounds with some video we have, we’ll keep them once workflow stabilizes with non-Sony cards. Also, as long as it’s class 6 or higher, you should be good. The higher the class, really doesn’t matter.

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, UT
FCP7/Sony EX-3/Mac Intel

[Tom Laughlin]

I’m having the very same issues with these cards, and one thing I’ve had to do is use FCP, use the camera as your playback deck, insert the cafd back into the camera, play the card off the camera, use an SDI-out of the camera, SDI-in to your Mac, via a Blackmagic card with SDI-in, and capture the video using the capture settings “Apple Pro Res 422 HQ 8-bit 59.94.” In this way, you can recover your video.

Now, if the video file is corrupted, there will be a stop during the playback, and a large blue screen “Halt: Media Error, Halted during Playback”- this means you are screwed. What I then found was that it was a small portion of corrupted video, so you might go to the playback in the card, find the thumbnail of the video clip that has the corruption, then hit “Expand the Clip”, then go into the area of where your captuirng stopped and the camera playback stopped, then you go to the next thumbnail and try to play it, a minute or two after, and I was able to salvage many clips doing this. Granted, if you shot multiple takes, of let’s say, an interview, you have other takes to grab the sound bites from, and re-insert that into the edit, using the audio from another take, covering you on the corrupted 1 or 2 minutes of video – that would not transfer over or playback.

One of my editor’s tried converting directly from the card, and sometimes have had no problems. But in this case, with non-recoverable video, unless you can play it back, it may be gone for good. You can off-load cards and come back to them and put them back on to cards (that have also been wiped) and you can put the video back on the cards and capture them later, but you also need to make sure that the ENTIRE file transfers over. During BPAV File transfer, regardless if it’s Sony software or not, you must right click on the copy of the BPAV, and see that those exact numbers match, example: BPAV Folder says 31GB on disk, but when you “right click” on the details, it says, (31,987,654,311 bytes). This (31,987,654,311 bytes) must match the original or the transfer is off, and most of the time it is, but just by a few numbers, so it appears that the data all transferred but in reality, it didn’t. Double-check everything, and don’t rely on a 1-2-3 step process, as everyone’s macs and softwares are different.

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, UT.

[Tom Laughlin]

In my battles to pull video off of a Transcend 32GB card using the Hoodman adaptor, latest Mac, FCP 7, and Snow Leopard, we found that it did not work using the Clip Browser, the log & Transfer Sony Software, or the FCP plug-in. The BPAV Folder seemed to be corrupted, as we’d get one out of the three clips to play out. One clip was a minute or so, and the other two clips were about 25 minutes each – giving us no time-code or info, and we could see that a thumbnail was not generated either. I went into the camera’s in camera play feature, and played the video, and it would play fine in camera, so we captured the video out using SDI-out, and into our BlackMagic Card installed on our Mac. Once 15 minutes into capturing, we’d get a blue error screen and the message “Media Error: Media Halted During Playback.”

So, to try and salvage that last 6 minutes or so, that would not allow me to replay, I went into the menu, and clicked on the clip, then in the clip menu, I went into “Expand Clip”, this allowed me to go throw each clip to finally arrive and play where it appeared there was corrupted video, and I selected the subclip after the corrupted 2-3 minutes, and captured the next and last 6 minutes, so there seemed to be a section in the BPAV folder that did not get written correctly. It was 2 minutes in the middle of this 25 minute clip that was causing the error. This may also be why the softwares were NOT importing or working with the footage, so it may not be a Snow Leopard issue, it may be card corruption or a small strand of corrupted video inside and housed in good video clips. We also tried this on multiple cards using the same BPAV Folder, os it wasn’t the fact that we went with a Transcend card versus the expensive Sony cards, it was hitting at the same spot. If you watch all of you video all the way through, it’s hard to catch it if you’re not watching, but there could be a small 30 seconds of corrupted video of sorts. The also affects how the clips are sequenced and if things are sequenced correctly, you can’t always go in the hit “Restore Media” because this card with this BPAV Folder did not indicate that any media needed to be restored, so after 2 weeks of battling, we were able to recover 98% by simply recapturing the card’s footage, capturing in real-time using FCP. Now we’re editing again.

In the last 5 months, we’ve shot over about thousand hours of video, if not more, using the Transcend cards, and with our loggers logging video, we are now finally getting word back months later, that we have out of those thousand hours, about 15% of the video is either not available, or the video cannot import, so we are looking at how to overcome this. I’ve heard that it’s not a card brand issue, it’s a camera or cameras issue. We’ve got about 35 of the Transcend 32GB cards, and so now we are trying to figure out at what point will this footage loss problem end, or footage import problems end?? We may have to go back and recapture them as well, but first I’ll try the Clip Browsers, Log/Transfer, then the FCP plug-in, and if we still cannot get the video to transfer into the softwares to convert them, we’ll need to recapture to .mov.

Thanks,

Tom Laughlin
FCP Editor/Producer
Salt Lake City, UT.